When I log in with OpenBox, all I get is a black screen and a mouse-pointer. Right-clicking gives some options, but none that seem to solve the problem. One solution I read was to do Ctrl-Alt-F3 en then Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart, but that didn't solve it either.

That's normal. You have to set Openbox up when you use it for the first time. You'll need to install a panel to use (I've used pypanel in the past, using fbpanel now), and something to handle wallpapers, like feh, and so forth.

I did have a bit of a struggle figuring things out the first time I used Openbox, a few years ago, but I kept decent notes, and things went a lot more smoothly the next few times I installed it. The last few times, I had installed LXDE to try out, but ended up using Openbox (which comes with LXDE) instead, because I like Openbox better (although LXDE seems to be improving quite rapidly).

Thanks for those links, but I'm a simple user, not a computer expert. I've been at it for 2 hours now and I still haven't a clue. I can figure this sort of stuff out, but it takes way too much time. For example, yesterday I spent the whole day editing fstab until I finally got most of my harddisks to mount on startup. A whole day to do something that should have taken just a few minutes in the Disk Utility. And it took 'only' a day because I made a bit of a study of it a few years back. I simply don't have the time for this.Btw, it would already be a great help if there were a bunch of commented-out examples in menu.xml.

During my search for a better Linux I came across one version of OpenBox that I liked, which worked 'out of the box' and I could configure with gui's. I think that was with Ubuntu. Is there no way to get it to start up in a workable environment like that? If not, I'm afraid OpenBox is no option for me.

Oh, there is also a start menu item Other > Openbox session (note that I also use lxdm). But that doesn't seem to change anything. For example, I still can't rearrange the start menu items, just one example of what I would like to do.

Arent there GUI tools like:obconf <--?Just one example, Mint comes with GNOME by default and has quite a few nicely setup Community Editions (LXDE; Fluxbox, KDE) and if you arent willing to learn howto setup OpenBox dont use it. BTW our fellow dev and IRC operator ikey once wrote a nice howto for setting up a Linux enviroment with OpenBox:http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=34554&p=199224&hilit=OpenBox+ikey#p199224It is split up in 3 parts, enjoy reading .

In kind regards,Roin

Last edited by Roin on Sun Jun 27, 2010 9:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

I took a look at the OpenBox documentation, and decided I just didn't have the time to read all of it. So for me the question was how to get rid of the black screen so I could use my computer again.

After a little research, I found that at the bottom of the login screen, there are three icons, one of which shows the label "Session". I clicked that icon, and chose MATE from the list that came up, and then clicked "Change Session". I logged in, and voila, I was back to my normal desktop. I then used the Software Manager to uninstall OpenBox.